How To Create an AI Workflow for SEO Content

By Jeremiah Greco

On the surface, all AI content is the same. With low-quality inputs or “prompts,” the content AI generates will most likely be bland and lack any qualities to set it apart from competing content. To make best-in-class AI content, you need to use best-in-class prompts so the chatbot will generate content that reflects the voice you want and includes useful information that also engages the reader. And part of delivering that best-in-class content is creating a workflow you and your team can follow that uses best search engine optimization (SEO) practices and a reliable system for creating, checking, and editing AI or hybrid (AI + human) content.

1. Choose Your Tools for Content Creation

Many free tools are available for content creation, and depending on your goals, some may be better than others. To keep things simple, let’s focus on tools you can use to generate copy-based content like blog posts, articles, category pages, and similar web pages you’d want to tighten up for SEO. We’ve found the best free tools for content creation to be Google’s Bard, Microsoft’s Bing Chat, and Open AI’s ChatGPT. And to be honest, among these free tools we spend most of our time in Bard, as it is the quickest and most accurate in delivering the content we’re looking for. We’ve also found the best AI content strategy is using Bard together with Grammarly’s paid-version AI, especially when working with a strict brand voice and style guide. Still, you’ll find each has strengths and weaknesses, so you will likely end up using a collection of tools (as you’ll see below).

2. Give Your AI Chatbot a Voice

Before you start requesting outputs from your chatbot of choice, you’ll first want to train its voice. You can do this by copying and pasting example copy into the chatbox and asking the bot to remember the style and to use it in future requests. Since we work with multiple clients, each with its own brand voice, I like to name the voice and save it in its own chat thread. An example prompt would look like this:Remember the following copy style and voice for future requests and call that voice “Super Client.” Whenever I ask for “Super Client’s voice” use this style.

Then, when the next content project comes up for that client, I can pick up where I left off in that thread with that voice.

As I mentioned, the example copy can be anything you aspire to. It could be your own copy, copy from a competitor or industry leader that you think is best-in-class, or a combination of both. I like to use a combination, as I think we’re best-in-class in many ways, but there are also industry leaders doing things extremely well.

3. Create Best Practices for AI Chatbot Prompts

As our Editor, Deb German covered recently, creating good chatbot prompts is the key to generating good AI content. Without using solid prompts and then refining those prompts to reach your goals, the final content will be lacking at best and inaccurate or unusable at worst. To understand how to craft a good prompt, I encourage you to dig into Deb’s article, which also covers using chatbots for optimizing copy.

Once you have a good prompt, how do you take your content to the next level, beyond your competitors? Try adding resources that only you have access to. Do you have data you can share in your content? Ask the chatbot to analyze your data for trends and include the analysis in the content.

Here’s an example (notice I’m using ChatGPT because the other tools had trouble answering my prompts):

Our client, Orvis, personalizes dog products with the dog’s name. They were able to provide us with a list of all of the personalization requests for dog products so we could see which dog names were most popular. With ChatGPT, I’m able to drop that list of names into a prompt and get the most popular names in return, skipping the need to work with spreadsheet functions.

*Note, I only entered the numerals and A’s for this example

And ChatGPT’s summary:

Now I have the building blocks for content about the Top 10 Most Popular Dog Names for Orvis Customers.

4. Add Human Touches

AI is good, but I have yet to be truly impressed with long-form AI copy that hasn’t been thoroughly finessed. And I think most AI content experts would agree, we’re a long way from being able to generate AI content that’s truly best-in-class for any topic. That’s where the human element comes in. Review the AI output and start adding your own words, sentences, or paragraphs as you feel they’re needed.

Depending on the article, I may ask AI for 1000 words and end up editing it and rewriting it down to an 800-word article with 600 to 700 of my own words. But, those words come much faster than if I had started with a blank page. Sometimes, I’m quite happy with what AI has generated, and starting with 1000 AI words, I’ll whittle them down to 800 with about 400 of my own. As you’ll find, the more niche your topic, the more writing you’ll need to do.

5. Refine the Output Using Editing AI

Once your content is ready for editing, the Grammarly AI can help make it perfect. Though it’s only available in the paid version, I’ve found this tool to be invaluable, especially for repetitive tasks like, “make sure all quotes are curly quotes.” But that’s just the beginning of Grammarly’s AI tool, which seems to have flown under the radar in a lot of AI content discussions. You can use the tool to find gaps in your content, suggest additional topics to be covered, or change the voice of your content entirely.

6. Return To Human Editing

Since the final consumer of all written content is a human reader, it only makes sense that the final editor should be a human. You likely already have editing processes in place so this shouldn’t be a major change to your existing workflow. But with the ease of AI, it’s easy to think you can skip this last step. I know I’ll always appreciate the feedback from a human editor, whether it’s my Editor (with a capital E) or my sister.